Title
Automated separation of binary overlapping trees in low-contrast color retinal images.
Abstract
While many approaches exist for the automated segmentation of retinal vessels in fundus photographs, limited work has focused on the problem of separating the arterial from the venous trees. The few existing approaches that do exist for separating arteries from veins are local and/or greedy in nature, making them susceptible to errors or limiting their applicability to only the very largest vessels. In this work, we propose a new, more global, optimization framework for separating two overlapping trees within medical images and apply this approach for the separation of arteriovenous trees in low-contrast color fundus images. In particular, our approach has two stages. The first stage is to generate a vessel potential connectivity map (VPCM) consisting of vessel segments and the potential connectivity between them. The second stage is to separate the VPCM into multiple anatomical trees using a graph-based meta-heuristic algorithm. Based on a graph model, the algorithm first uses local knowledge and global constraints of the vasculature to generate near-optimal candidate solutions, and then obtains the final solution based on global costs. We test the algorithm on 48 low-contrast fundus images and the promising results suggest its applicability and robustness.
Year
Venue
Field
2013
Lecture Notes in Computer Science
Vessel segmentation,Computer vision,Graph,Pattern recognition,Computer science,Segmentation,Fundus (eye),Robustness (computer science),Artificial intelligence,Graph model,Limiting,Binary number
DocType
Volume
Issue
Conference
8150
Pt 2
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0302-9743
2
0.36
References 
Authors
0
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Qiao Hu120.36
Michael D Abràmoff21734104.74
Mona K Garvin327217.51